Plastic Surgeons Weigh In On The Ethics Of Celebrity-Inspired Procedures“And while we’re all for a person’s right to choose whether or not plastic surgery is for them, we couldn’t help but wonder about the ethics behind celebrity-inspired procedures. For instance, what do doctors do if they think a client’s desire for change verges on obsession? Do they refuse procedures or go a different route?”

Videos during surgery? Some plastic surgeons go too far, Northwestern researchers say“
In recent years, some plastic surgeons have started posting videos of their surgeries on social media in hopes of informing and attracting new patients. But in some cases, their antics seem designed more for entertainment than education, raising ethical questions, according to a new paper from Northwestern Medicine researchers published in the journal Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery.”

Editorial: SF’s Ethics Board fails to tackle money in politics
“The San Francisco Ethics Commission had the opportunity to pass a commonsense measure to curtail money in politics. It failed. The ordinance would have banned the practice of allowing political donors to contribute to the charitable causes of favored candidates when those donors have a contract up for approval or a pending land-use decision in front of city officials.”

How to Get Away With Murder, or at Least Corruption, in Brazil
“No less than 40 percent of Brazil’s 594 lawmakers face formal investigations before the Supreme Court, the tribunal’s figures show. Forty-seven deputies and eight senators are currently defendants in criminal trials. Just two have lost their jobs over corruption charges.”

Veterans Agency Seeks to Scrap Ethics Law on For-Profit Colleges
“The Department of Veterans Affairs is pushing to suspend a 50-year-old ethics law that prevents employees from receiving money or owning a stake in for-profit colleges that pocket hundreds of millions of dollars in tuition paid through the G.I. Bill of Rights.”

Menendez trial: Prosecutors tie political donations to Menendez meeting
“U.S. Sen. Robert Menendez requested a meeting with a high-ranking State Department official to talk about port security issues in the Dominican Republic on the same day that Florida eye doctor Salomon Melgen agreed to donate $60,000 to help Menendez’s re-election and to fight a recall effort against him, prosecutors said Thursday. Melgen owned a 50 percent stake in a company, ICSSI, that was urging the Dominican government to honor a port security screening contract that could potentially be worth hundreds of millions of dollars, according to prosecutors.”

Business Ethics

Why values and ethics are good for business
“It is a privilege to be a trusted and integral part of a person’s recovery from addiction. So, I am deeply troubled when I see facilities cutting corners and bending the rules to increase revenue or profit. These actions are not only short-sighted from a business standpoint, but also highly unethical and potentially dangerous to those who have entrusted us to help them recover.

The Morality of Charles Koch
“For those who regard capitalism and Christianity as mortal enemies, few villains loom as large as Charles Koch, whose name in some quarters has become a synonym for a system based on greed and exploitation. By his own admission, the libertarian-leaning billionaire is not religious. So why would such a man choose the Catholic University of America for a $10 million gift to help relaunch its business school?”

Educational/Academic Ethics

Harvard Business School earns an incomplete in ethics
“Some argue that you can’t teach ethics to a bunch of 26-year-olds. But you can certainly lead by example. Alas, the recent example set by the leadership of HBS shows a blatant disregard for even the simplest of ethical considerations.”

Who should die when a driverless car crashes? Q&A ponders the future
“Should a driverless car swerve to miss a child, knowing it will kill its passenger? Or should it maintain its path and end a younger life? It’s deeply troubling ethical dilemmas like these that Sandra Peter believes will hinder the mass uptake of driverless cars, possibly beyond our lifetimes.”

Ethics of Internet research trigger scrutiny
A research paper that used publicly available data about people’s addresses and likely movements to unmask the anonymous graffiti artist Banksy “highlights growing concerns about the potential hazards of research that uses public data.”

Software engineers must think deeply about ethics
“I believe technology is immensely constructive and, like any power, if wielded correctly, can in fact make the world a better place. I still believe most jobs will be automated, and, in the long run, humanity will be better off from it. But great power must be accompanied by great responsibility, which remains largely absent in Silicon Valley.”

Illegal Strikes and Political Obligation – What Reasons Do We Have To Obey The Law?“I do not intend to address the moral and economic considerations involved in the question of the amount that a fair society should pay to its public sector workers. Rather, I shall be interested in the nature of the reasons that we may have to obey laws we disagree with, and the implications that our answer to this question may have for whether we should support illegal strikes of this sort.”

An Experiment Gives Cash Aid To The Poor. Is That Ethical?“Is it moral for experimenters to bestow a benefit on one group of people and not another? And what are the risks of unintended negative consequences — creating lasting income inequalities between villages, for instance, or even fueling tensions between the residents?”

Bioethics expert says ‘de-valuing’ human beings is 21st century malady“Dr. John Haas, President of the National Catholic Bioethics Center, says that beneath specific conundrums that arise in the field of bioethics these days lies a deeper challenge that the Catholic Church is uniquely equipped to address: A ‘de-valuing’ of human beings, which turns the weak and vulnerable into commodities to be exploited by the wealthy and powerful.”

How Much Do A Company’s Ethics Matter In The Modern Professional Climate?“A company’s ethics and corporate social responsibility matter more today than they did a few decades ago. Workers place a higher emphasis on the values of their employers, and have access to more information than ever before. If you want your company to remain competitive in the hunt for the best candidates in your field, spend some time defining, perfecting, and promoting your company’s ethical behavior.”

Business ethics: moving beyond just compliance“Financial professionals have become used to compliance requirements placed upon them by regulators including aspects such as treating customers fairly, anti-money laundering, data protection and anti-bribery policies, to name a few. Professional bodies also have member codes of conduct. However, following historical financial scandals, trust in the financial profession remains low.”

What Happens When Lyft Redesigns A Street“Ride sharing is here to stay, and autonomous vehicles are imminent. But the implications for cities are less than clear… How should our aging infrastructure adapt to these changes–and who should be shaping (and funding) it?”

The ethics of free speech in the Trump era“Universities, as influential institutions, should be allowed to make a moral distinction as to when free speech devolves into hate speech and when pro-Trump political stances may bear negative consequences in the lives of their campus community members.”

Why museums need their own ethics departments“While museums may have codes of ethics that aim (with varying degrees of success) to regulate professional conduct, they lack internal institutional support for sustained research into these pressing and fundamental issues. Adopting the ethics of art as a core area of research should be embraced as part of the museum mission.”

Neil Gorsuch Speech at Trump Hotel Raises Ethical Questions
“Justice Neil M. Gorsuch, President Trump’s Supreme Court appointee, is scheduled to address a conservative group at the Trump International Hotel in Washington next month, less than two weeks before the court is set to hear arguments on Mr. Trump’s travel ban.”

CRISPR and the Ethics of Human Embryo Research
“Although scientists in China and the United Kingdom have already used gene editing on human embryos, the announcement that the research is now being done in the United States makes a U.S. policy response all the more urgent.”

The Ethics Issue Blocking Organ Transplant Research
“The ethics of so-called donor-intervention research are incredibly fraught. How do you get informed consent and from whom? The dead donor? The live recipient—or possibly dozens of live recipients getting tissues or organs from a single donor, fanned out across the country at different hospitals each with their own ethics review boards? All this would unfold against intense time pressure. Every minute of delay is a minute in which the organ is deteriorating.”

What do revised U.S. rules mean for human research?
“Following a contentious 5½-year process, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Office for Human Research Protections (OHRP) released a revised “Common Rule,” which governs federally funded research involving human subjects (1). The updated rule includes a number of welcome changes for U.S. institutions and researchers, and their scientific collaborators abroad.”

“We have made more progress in artificial intelligence (AI) in the last three years than in the preceding three decades. AI is transforming from handy little applications that make our lives easier (from Alexa and Siri to Uber and Netflix) to something more powerful…”

Trump’s Supreme Court Pick Could Shape Bioethics for GenerationsNeil Gorsuch, nominee for the US Supreme Court, has spent his career weighing matters of life and death. His views on life—that it is sacred and “intrinsically valuable”—are likely to shape court decisions in areas from abortion to assisted suicide for decades to come.

Trump and Pence on science, in their own words
Donald Trump and Mike Pence’s career and campaign track record of false claims about science, rejection of research conclusions and dangerous rhetoric on misconceptions such as vaccines and autism